Review: Caverna – The Cave Farmers

Introduction & Overview

Are you ready to become the bearded leader of a family of dwarves living peacefully in a small cave beside the mountains? Get ready to work the forest that stretches out beyond your home and delve deep into the heart of the mountain you inhabit.

This is how we are introduced to Caverna, designed by the great Uwe Rosenberg, the mind behind massive hits like Agricola, Le Havre, and Patchwork. The game was first published in 2013 by Lookout Games in both German and English editions. Artwork duties were handled, as is usual for the Rosenberg-Lookout pairing, by Klemens Franz, who also illustrated Agricola, Ora et Labora, and At the Gates of Loyang.

In our country, it was initially published in a first edition by Homoludicus, now Devir. The latter released a second edition in late 2015. The game is moderately language-dependent, as the room tiles and action spaces contain text, though with a reference sheet it can easily be played with a copy in another language. It supports 1 to 7 players, with a suggested minimum age of 12 and an approximate playing time of about 30 minutes per player. Its suggested retail price is €69.95. For this review, we used a second edition copy published by Devir, kindly provided as a review copy by the publisher.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and base), measuring 31.5×22.5×10 cm (a rectangular box similar in dimensions to Terra Mystica, though with even more depth), we find the following components:

• 20 Dog figures (wooden)
• 35 Sheep figures (wooden)
• 30 Donkey figures (wooden)
• 30 Wild Boar figures (wooden)
• 30 Cattle figures (wooden)
• 45 Wood pieces (wooden)
• 25 Stone pieces (wooden)
• 45 Ore pieces (plastic)
• 20 Ruby pieces (plastic)
• 40 Grain tokens (wooden)
• 35 Vegetable tokens (wooden)
• Starting Player Marker (wooden)
• 21 Stables (7 in each of the player colors: green, blue, red, natural wood, purple, turquoise, and yellow) (wooden)
• 35 Dwarf Discs (5 in each of the player colors: green, blue, red, natural wood, purple, turquoise, and yellow) (wooden)
• 7 Home Boards (cardboard)
• 5 Action Boards (cardboard)
• 4 Furnishing Supply Boards (cardboard)
• 49 Gold Coins (cardboard)
  • 20 Value 1
  • 24 Value 2
  • 5 Value 10
• Additional Dwarf Tile (cardboard)
• 88 Food Tokens (cardboard)
• 7 Harvest Event Tokens (cardboard)
• 52 Weapon Strength Markers (cardboard)
  • 1 Strength 1
  • 1 Strength 2
  • 4 Strength 3–13 (4 for each level)
  • 6 Strength 14
• 8 Multiplier 4x/Begging Markers (cardboard)
• 8 Resource Markers (cardboard)
• 17 Dwelling Tiles (all identical) (cardboard)
• 47 Furnishing Tiles (all distinct) (cardboard)
• 8 Single Tunnel/Cavern Tiles (cardboard)
• 16 Single Ruby Mine/Field Tiles (cardboard)
• 16 Meadow/Small Pasture Tiles (cardboard)
• 24 Twin Ore Mine/Deep Pasture Tiles (cardboard)
• 40 Twin Cavern-Tunnel/Cavern-Cavern Tiles (cardboard)
• 40 Twin Field-Meadow/Field-Pasture Tiles (cardboard)
• 29 Cards (59×92 mm):
  • Harvest Event Card
  • 12 Round Action Cards
  • 7 Ruby and Harvest Summary Cards
  • 7 Expedition Loot Summary Cards
  • 2 Dwarf Cards for solo and 2-player games
• Scorepad
• Rulebook
• Appendix

How to Play

Caverna is a worker placement game in which each player leads a small family of dwarves striving to excavate their mountain, furnish caverns, clear the outside forest, and cultivate the land to prosper. The game is played over twelve rounds structured into phases. At the start of each round, a new action space is revealed and accumulating resources are replenished on the central board. Afterwards, players take turns placing one dwarf onto an unoccupied action space to immediately resolve it (placing armed dwarves in ascending order of weapon strength). Action spaces allow players to clear forests, plow and sow fields, excavate tunnels and caverns, furnish rooms to obtain special abilities or house new family members, build pastures and stables for livestock breeding, or forge weapons using ore to undertake expeditions and claim diverse loot items. As free actions, players can convert resources and livestock into food at any time or trade rubies, which serve as wild resources to acquire tiles or goods. At the end of most rounds, a harvest phase occurs where crops are harvested, the family must be fed with food (under penalty of receiving begging markers), and animals breed if suitable space is available. After the final round is completed, final scoring takes place by tallying points for animals, crops, rubies, dwarves, cavern and mine tiles, room bonus scoring, and accumulated gold coins, while subtracting points for unused board spaces, missing livestock types, and begging markers. The player with the highest total gold score is declared the winner.

Key Concepts

As in any proper worker placement game, the workers are the core engine of the match. Here, they take the form of wooden discs representing the Dwarves inhabiting our cave. In each round, every dwarf must execute one action, which then becomes unavailable for the remainder of the round. Players start with 2 dwarves, though the family can be expanded over the course of the game.

Let’s talk about player boards. First, we have the individual Home Board assigned to each player. It displays a grid of four rows and 6 columns. The first three columns represent the exterior forest, while the last three represent the interior of the mountain. Except for the initial starting spaces (the pre-printed dwelling and an excavated cavern space inside the cave area), the remaining spaces depict forest (outside the cave) or solid rock (inside the cave). Furthermore, some spaces display bonus resources that are gained immediately when clearing the forest or excavating rock on that specific spot.

In the forest area, players can clear trees to lay down meadows, pastures, or plowed fields:

• Plowed fields allow sowing vegetables and grain.
• Meadows allow keeping sheep, provided they are watched over by dogs.
• Fenced pastures allow housing any type of farm animal (without mixing species within the same pasture). Each pasture space can hold a pair of animals.
• Additionally, players can build stables. If placed inside a fenced pasture, they double its holding capacity. If placed in an open forest or meadow space, they provide shelter for a single animal of any species.

In the cavern section, players excavate the solid rock to open up tunnels or rooms:

• Rooms can be furnished with room tiles, which grant various perks and abilities to the player who builds them. These tiles display their name and resource building cost along the top edge. In that same top row, on the right, a shield displays the number of victory points awarded at the end of the game.
• On the other hand, players can excavate tunnels to subsequently dig out mines:
  • An ore mine requires two adjacent tunnel spaces, also opening up an additional deep tunnel space. It awards 3 points at game end.
  • A ruby mine requires only a single tunnel space (regardless of depth). It awards bonus victory points at the end of the game.

All these tiles (both single and twin, whether forest or cavern) must always be placed orthogonally adjacent to an already placed tile on the board (starting from the initial pre-printed dwelling).

Returning to the rooms, these are laid out on several supply boards in full view of all players, allowing everyone to see which ones remain available at all times. These boards organize the rooms by their function and effects. Of special note are the Dwellings, which are the rooms required to house new dwarves in our cave.

In addition to victory points, certain actions and rooms yield extra ore and/or rubies based on the number of excavated mines.

On the other side of the table we have the action boards, where players place their dwarves to perform various tasks. These boards scale according to player count, featuring a set of basic actions available right from the start alongside others that enter play progressively as the rounds advance. Two essential details to keep in mind:

• There are accumulating action spaces where resources pile up round after round until someone claims them. These spaces are marked by a small arrow indicating the number of goods placed on them each new round. Some show two values, the second in parentheses. In that case, the first value applies if the space is empty, and the second applies when adding to existing resources on that space.
• Most action spaces offer multiple sub-actions, though in some cases later steps depend on successfully executing the preceding one. Regardless, to place a dwarf on an action space, a player must be able to perform at least one of the available options.

We have already mentioned a few, but throughout the game we will manage several types of resources to reach different goals:

• Wood: used for furnishing rooms and fencing pastures.
• Stone: used for furnishing rooms and building stables.
• Ore: allows forging weapons for dwarf expeditions. Additionally, certain rooms require ore to be built.
• Rubies: practically speaking, they act as wild resources. They can be exchanged at any time for any resource or animal (except cattle, which requires an additional 1 food), or even single tiles like meadows, plowed fields, or tunnel spaces. 2 rubies can purchase a single cavern tile.
• Gold: provides victory points at the end of the game, though it can also be spent to buy food.

We also have various types of animals:

• Dogs: the only animal type not classified as farm livestock. Because of this, they can roam anywhere on the board without occupying capacity space. Besides awarding victory points, they allow guarding flocks of sheep in meadows (one more sheep than the number of dogs present on that meadow).
• The remaining farm animals (sheep, wild boars, donkeys, and cattle) score victory points at game end (or deduct points if a species is missing entirely) and can be converted into food at any time. To keep them on your board, fenced pastures are required, with two exceptions: sheep can form flocks in meadows alongside dogs, and donkeys can be placed inside mines (one donkey per mine).

At the end of specific rounds, a harvest phase takes place, during which grain and vegetables are harvested from fields, dwarves must be fed, and any animal species of which you own at least a breeding pair will reproduce. A green marker indicates rounds that conclude with a full harvest. However, three rounds feature a red symbol instead. In these rounds, there is no standard harvest, but rather an end-of-round event drawn from the card where these event tokens accumulate.

Food is required to feed our dwarves during harvest phases. As mentioned, farm animals can be converted into food and gold can be spent to buy food without requiring any specific room to do so. The main difference between gold and food is that gold provides victory points, whereas food tokens do not. If a player is unable to cover their family’s food demand, they must take begging markers, which deduct points heavily at the end of the game.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

1. Place the action boards corresponding to the player count in the center of the table.
2. Arrange all resources along with single and twin tiles into a general supply reachable by all players.
3. Set up the furnishing boards and fill them with all the room tiles.
4. Prepare the round card deck (in 1- and 2-player games there is one less round, skipping round 9, and the Exploration action with 4 loot items is removed) and reveal the first round card.
5. Place starting goods on all accumulating action spaces.
6. Each player receives a Home Board, 5 dwarf discs, and 3 stables. Place 2 of the 5 discs inside the pre-printed dwelling, keeping the remaining 3 aside.
7. Choose a starting player and give them the Starting Player Marker.
8. Starting with that player and going clockwise, distribute starting food: 1 food to the first player, 1 food to the second, 2 food to the third, and 3 food to the fourth player and any subsequent players.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Caverna lasts 12 rounds (11 in 2-player games). Each round is divided into four phases.

Phase I: Upkeep

Proceed as follows:

• Reveal a new round card and place it onto the next available space on the action board.
• Replenish resources on all accumulating action spaces.

Phase II: Work Phase

Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player sends one of their dwarves to an unoccupied action space on the central board.

If a player has armed dwarves, they must be placed in ascending order of weapon strength, starting with any unarmed dwarves first. A player may bypass this order to place a stronger armed dwarf early by returning 1 ruby to the general supply.

Once a player has placed all of their dwarves, their participation in this phase ends, and their turns are skipped while other players place any remaining workers.

The phase ends once all players have placed all of their dwarves.

Each action space provides one or more of the following options:

• Take Resources: claim the resources accumulated on the space or take the specified resources from the general supply.
• Clear Forest: place a twin field-meadow tile over two adjacent forest spaces.
• Excavate: place a twin tunnel-cavern or cavern-cavern tile over two adjacent mountain spaces.
• Family Growth: bring a new dwarf into play, provided you have an empty dwelling available.
• Arm Dwarves: forge weapons for dwarves by spending ore.
• Go on Expedition: allow armed dwarves to undertake expeditions and claim loot. An expedition has a set loot level, indicating how many loot items can be chosen. The available rewards depend on the dwarf’s current weapon strength.
• Build Fences and Stables: build fenced pastures by spending wood (single or twin) and stables by spending stone.
• Sow: plant grain and vegetables. This action typically has a limit of up to 2 items of each crop type (up to four crops planted across separate empty plowed fields). Sowing a vegetable takes 1 extra from the supply (placing 2 total), while sowing grain takes 2 extra from the supply (placing 3 total).
• Starting Player: take the Starting Player Marker for the next round.

Phase III: Returning Home

Players retrieve all of their placed dwarves from the action spaces. If an armed dwarf completed an expedition during this round, increase its weapon strength marker by 1.

Phase IV: Harvest Time

Occurs in every round marked with a green symbol on its space. It consists of three sequential steps:

1. Field Phase (Harvest): harvest 1 crop from each plowed field containing sown goods. Once a field is cleared of all crops, it becomes available to be sown again in future rounds.
2. Feeding Phase: each dwarf requires 2 food, with the exception of a newborn dwarf added during the current round, which only requires 1 food. Remember that players can use the conversion chart at the bottom right of their board to convert animals and gold into food at any moment. For each unit of food a player cannot provide, they must take a begging marker.
3. Breeding Phase: players receive one newborn animal for each farm animal species (dogs excluded) of which they own at least a pair (only one offspring per species), provided there is adequate holding capacity. If there is no available space, the newborn is discarded immediately with no compensation. Breeding pairs do not need to share the same pasture or stable to reproduce.

Game End

The game concludes after resolving the final round. Final scoring is carried out, with each player tallying:

• 1 Victory Point for each animal.
• -2 Victory Points for each missing farm animal type (dogs excluded).
• 1 Victory Point for every 2 grain (rounded up).
• 1 Victory Point for each vegetable.
• 1 Victory Point for each ruby.
• 1 Victory Point for each dwarf.
• -1 Victory Point for each unused board space (spaces without any tile or stable, dogs do not count).
• Victory Points awarded by pastures, furnished cavern rooms, and mines.
• 1 Victory Point for each Gold Coin.
• -3 Victory Points for each Begging Marker.

The player with the most victory points wins. In the event of a tie, players share the victory.

Variants

Solo Game. The goal is to score as many victory points as possible. It plays similarly to a 2-player game with the following adjustments:

• You begin with 2 food.
• Place all round cards face down (except round 9, which is covered with a dwarf card, just like in 2-player games). Additionally, cover the Wish for Children card with the second dwarf card, making it unavailable until round 4. In each round, flip the corresponding round card face up.
• There are no random events. From round 5 onwards, a full harvest always occurs.
• Rubies accumulate on the ruby mining action space starting in round 1.
• Before refilling an accumulating space, if it currently holds 6 or more units of that resource, they are discarded back to the supply unless the player pays 1 ruby per space to preserve them.

Introductory Game. Simply played with a significantly reduced selection of room tiles. The reverse sides of the furnishing boards indicate which tiles are included in this introductory setup.

Personal Opinion

The moment has finally arrived. I know many of you have been waiting patiently. Some even wondered if it would ever happen… But yes, courtesy of Devir, you finally have at your full disposal, scroll wheel at the ready, the tocho-review of Caverna, Uwe Rosenberg’s design that unseated Agricola on the BGG rankings to take third place on the podium behind Twilight Struggle (find its tocho-review here) and Terra Mystica (find its tocho-review here). Without further ado, let’s dive into this sea of cardboard and wood.

Agricola is my all-time favorite game. Regular followers of this blog will already know this well. It was the title that kicked off my board game collection, and it still holds that top spot. So when Caverna launched in 2013 billed as a 2.0 overhaul of what I consider a virtually flawless game, I felt a slight twinge of betrayal from the German designer.

To be fair, Uwe hasn’t exactly been known for radical reinvention in his designs. Ever since that farming game opened the gates of Mount Olympus to him, almost every year brought a new title centered on worker placement and resource management. Each introduced small twists that provided a slightly different gameplay experience.

Between 2007 and 2009, we saw the release of what became known as the Harvest Trilogy, with Agricola (tocho-review here) as its crowning achievement, Le Havre (tocho-review here) as another outstanding heavyweight, and At the Gates of Loyang (tocho-review here) as a design distinct enough from the other two to stand firmly on its own feet.

Following a one-year break, Rosenberg returned to the fray with a second harvest trilogy: Ora et Labora (tocho-review here), today’s featured game, and Fields of Arle (tocho-review here). While I haven’t tackled the last one yet, you already have a full review of the monastic title. In short, it borrows building development and resource production chains (raw materials versus processed goods) from Le Havre, blending them with the spatial tile placement of Agricola. Its standout addition was the resource wheel (rondel) to handle supply accumulation—a mechanism later refined and reused in Glass Road (tocho-review here) and Le Havre: The Inland Port.

And so we arrive at Caverna. A game that takes the absolute core essence of Agricola and focuses on “fixing” what some felt were rough edges in the Aurich-born author’s masterpiece.

First and foremost was the minor luck factor that created asymmetrical starting hands via the dealing of occupations and minor improvements at the beginning of the game. An official drafting variant exists to mitigate lopsided starting hands, but even then, a lucky draw could hand a decisive advantage to a player right out of the gate.

To eliminate this, these cards are replaced by room tiles that we furnish inside our personal cave. In a way, they represent a fusion of both card types: generally speaking, you pay resources to build them and must meet certain prerequisites (having excavated rooms available). As a result, random card draws vanish entirely. Every single room is available from turn one for all players.

Another point of contention that turned some players away from Agricola was its punishing tightness. A game of Agricola is a relentless tug-of-war between developmental ambition and basic survival needs. Slaughtering wooden animals you grew fond of just to feed your family can feel brutal. But that is life on the farm.

To alleviate this, Caverna grants every player an innate cooking ability from the get-go (what was previously the Fireplace/Cooking Hearth major improvement in Agricola), letting you convert animals into food at any point.

Yet, despite having fewer rounds, Caverna features more harvest phases than Agricola. While this might sound like it would make feeding even tighter, it is completely offset by Expeditions—the major mechanical innovation here. Through these actions, dwarves (workers) gear up with weapons and gain weapon strength levels. The higher this level, the wider the menu of loot rewards they can bring back. A heavily armed dwarf can easily plow a field, haul home a cow, or even furnish a cavern. Caverna thus provides numerous viable escape valves to ease harvest tension.

As if that weren’t enough, rubies enter the picture as flexible wild resources that can be exchanged at any moment for a wide array of goods and tiles.

Development tension is thus significantly relaxed. That left only one other major stress factor from Agricola to address: the demand for balanced farm development. As you may recall, Agricola’s scoring system docks points for every category where you lack presence. Furthermore, most scoring categories have low caps, making it pointless to over-specialize in one area while neglecting others.

This requirement is also considerably softened in Caverna. The only categories that penalize you are missing farm animal types (quadrupeds), begging markers, and unused grid spaces (which carry over). But you are no longer penalized for lacking plowed fields, vegetables, grain, or fenced pastures. They still award positive points, but their absence will not cost you.

Consequently, Caverna feels far more open and sandbox-like in individual development, allowing players to focus heavily on engine combos unlocked by the rooms they construct. You feel this flexibility throughout the game: even if an opponent takes an action you desperately wanted, you almost always have two or three solid alternative moves that will keep your engine humming along smoothly.

The tension instead emerges once players master the game and real optimization battles begin. Every placement must be milked for maximum value—not merely in utility, but directly in victory points. In Agricola, you generally focus first on establishing a stable feeding engine before branching out. Here, thanks to abundant feeding avenues (livestock, grain, vegetables, rubies, expeditions that hand out everything on a platter), you are calculating points from turn one.

This shift carries one small downside: the superb thematic immersion Agricola was celebrated for gets slightly diluted. In Agricola, the goal is to build a well-rounded, functioning farm within tight constraints. Everyone has to plow, fence, expand the family, sow, harvest, and gather livestock. Scoring well is the natural byproduct of running a sound farmstead. In Caverna, because you are optimizing points right from the opening move amid a sea of open possibilities, player caverns can diverge wildly. Players tend to tunnel-vision purely on point yield rather than building a coherent, realistic estate.

All things considered, Caverna delivers more than enough distinct flavor for fans of Rosenberg’s euro designs (myself included). It offers greater freedom and more room combinations—a natural design evolution following Le Havre and Ora et Labora. And, from what I understand, Fields of Arle doubles down on this path.

I see only two minor drawbacks compared to its predecessor. First is the sheer cognitive load and information overload on display. The first time you sit in front of a fully set up Caverna and stare at 48 distinct room tiles—each with its own cost, prerequisites, and special rules—you have two choices: call a 30-minute timeout to study the board, or wing it and accept that experienced players will exploit synergy combos far more effectively. While the introductory mode helps by cutting down the tile pool, stepping up to the complete game remains an intimidating hurdle.

Compounding this is the multi-tiered nature of action spaces. Placing a worker rarely means taking a single straightforward action; instead, a single spot might let you furnish a dwelling and immediately take a family growth action, or clear a forest, grab a grain, and sow it on the spot. This action chaining hurts overall accessibility. Agricola, despite its unforgiving difficulty, remains remarkably clean to teach to newcomers because its action spaces are dead simple: take wood, build fences, plow a field, and so on.

Because of this, when introducing Caverna to someone unfamiliar with worker placement games, the learning curve is noticeably steeper. It is not fundamentally overwhelmingly complex, but there are undeniably more moving parts packed into fewer rounds.

Put simply, Agricola feels like a much more elegant design. Players transitioning from Agricola will quickly notice that several design choices in Caverna were specifically made to sand down the sharp edges that frustrated certain gamers. In doing so, some elements feel a bit disjointed. Take harvests, for instance: in Agricola, it is completely intuitive—a harvest occurs at the end of each stage (round column). Period. In Caverna, it varies. There are rounds with no harvest, rounds with full harvests, and rounds with randomly drawn events. Depending on player count, an entire round is even removed (in 1-2 player games). Some may defend this as introducing tactical spice and unpredictability that forces you to pivot, but it never fully won me over.

These grievances are ultimately minor details that explain why Agricola remains the superior game in my book. But that should in no way detract from what is an exceptional reimagining of Uwe’s magnum opus. Both are top-tier masterpieces, and which one you favor will come down to personal taste. If you value tight, demanding survival and crisp design simplicity, Agricola will likely satisfy you more. If you prefer open-ended sandbox development, diverse scoring avenues, and building without the anxiety of harsh penalties, Caverna will prove much more rewarding. And if worker placement isn’t your cup of tea, you should steer clear of both, as brilliant as they are.

Both titles share the same core gameplay loop: worker placement and action execution aimed squarely at developing your player board to maximize end-game victory points.

Unsurprisingly, both also share that tedious upkeep phase between rounds. When all players pitch in, it goes smoothly enough; but leave it to a single player, and missing an accumulating space is all too easy. Caverna exacerbates this slightly due to the sheer quantity of spaces that accumulate goods.

Setup time also warrants a mention. Laying out every single cavern tile onto its corresponding slot on the supply boards consumes precious minutes that could otherwise be spent playing. Again, with experienced players helping out it is manageable, but otherwise it drags.

Before wrapping up, I must highlight the sheer satisfaction these games generate—lest this read like an Agricola versus Caverna showdown rather than a dedicated review. For the record, worker placement is easily one of my favorite mechanics. These are games where you truly feel the satisfaction of building something from scratch. Every milestone comes through careful planning, incremental steps, and watching your opponents closely to jump on contested spots. Caverna, alongside Agricola, is the absolute gold standard for this feeling. There are other brilliant worker placement designs out there—such as Caylus (tocho-review here) or Carson City (tocho-review here)—but they evoke an entirely different feel because development happens on a shared communal board. It is not exclusively your own creation nurtured entirely by your choices. Building your homestead is immensely rewarding, regardless of whether you win. It is almost second nature to grab your phone at the end of a match and snap a photo of your finished Caverna board, bursting with fields, mines, and livestock.

Let’s discuss player scaling. One area where Caverna truly shines is its player count range: 1 to 7 players. And true to form, it scales remarkably well across the board—though I doubt many groups will regularly assemble more than five brave souls willing to crunch resources for hours on end. Agricola was already generous by going up to 5 players, but Caverna pushes the envelope even further. The only real caveat is game length at higher counts, but the fact that it works at all is an achievement.

When it comes to replayability, I feel Caverna takes a slight step back. While 48 distinct room tiles provide plenty of strategic pathways across multiple plays, it lacks the boundless variability generated by Agricola’s massive occupation and minor improvement decks. Pure euro purists will celebrate the zero-luck, open-information starting board, but I miss that unique personal roadmap each player received at the start of Agricola. A static board also tends to encourage falling back on familiar, proven room combos. If you play competitively, it is hard to resist strategies that have served you well before. Thankfully, opponents are always around to snatch the tiles you were eyeing. Still, these are minor gripes: while Agricola might feel slightly more directed by your starting hand, Caverna puts the steering wheel entirely in your hands.

Turning to component quality: as is standard for Lookout Games and Devir, the production value is superb—especially the thick cardboard punchboards. There is nothing quite like punchboards stiff enough that the tiles practically pop out on their own. The player boards are equally sturdy and satisfying. Having fully customized wooden meeples for every single animal and resource is a wonderful touch. I still vividly remember opening my original Agricola box filled with plain colored cubes representing sheep, wild boars, and cattle, which forced me to buy third-party animeeples and vegimeeples to upgrade the experience. Grabbing these custom wood and stone pieces is a joy. My only small critique: was there really no other silhouette or color for wood? It is remarkably easy to mistake a brown wood log for a poor cow. All of this comes packed inside a massive box with no plastic insert, filled to the absolute brim. Just like with Agricola, picking up a couple of craft storage organizers for the resources is practically mandatory if you want to prevent upkeep from descending into chaos. Pay close attention to organizer dimensions, though, or you will quickly run out of room in the box. Zero wasted air. I also appreciate how the rulebook is written with Agricola veterans in mind, clearly highlighting key differences so returning players can hit the ground running. Cleanly structured, rich in examples, and thorough. A treat.

On the downside, including components for a 6th and 7th player (and arguably even the 5th) feels unnecessary. It adds a substantial amount of material that most gaming groups will rarely use, bloating the box’s size, weight, and retail price. In my view, this extra content would have worked far better as an optional expansion, even if commercial demand for it might have been modest.

On art duty, we once again have Klemens Franz, a fixture of Lookout Games releases. Whether his quirky style appeals to you or not, it has become an iconic staple of the genre. His lighthearted, cozy art style is packed with care, featuring playful inside jokes and self-referential easter eggs. Spotting Franz’s hidden visual gags across the room tiles is a fun little metagame in itself. In Caverna, he undertook a mammoth task given the sheer volume of tiles and boards involved. My only minor critique is the night-mode illustration on the reverse side of the player boards: visually striking, but completely impractical to play on. It also clashes awkwardly with the rest of the supply tiles, which lack a night-side version. Let’s see if anyone ever dares to release a “Caverna Tuning” expansion to match all the assets!

And let’s wrap this up. Caverna is a superb design that inherits Agricola’s core conceptual DNA—pairing brilliant worker placement with tight resource management—while introducing an expedition system that broadens tactical options considerably. The complete elimination of luck, combined with more forgiving feeding requirements and the freedom to build room combos from turn one, creates a rewarding, point-optimization race that feels great to play. Watching your personalized cave and homestead expand step by step provides an immensely satisfying sense of growth. On the flip side, the opening wave of information overload, multi-step action spaces, and somewhat fiddly round upkeep can bog down early plays. Nevertheless, its immense strategic depth and satisfying engine building make it a masterfully crafted, essential title for worker placement enthusiasts looking for freedom, depth, and breathing room. For all these reasons, I give it a…